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Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

theguardian.com

231–240 of 271 posts

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#231

Here, in Spain, internet access is cut off for many websites during football matches because La Liga, the association football league, is in war against cloudflare for not blocking their allegedly offending websites. Or something like that. Today, I tried to look up a word on a dictionary and I got an error message. “There must be a football game going on right now”. I thought

Thought you must be exaggerating but after reading further I’m shocked. I know the courts can be a tech illiterate but why are the Spanish courts this bad? Surely they see the consequences of the decision and immediately realise it’s stupid? The UK can be pretty bad with this stuff and the Premier League is huge but I have no concern of something this idiotic happening here.

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this literally happens in mexico, monterrey in 2022 during biggest drought in the century, public supply was shut down while coca-cola keep producing soft drink from that reservoir, they end-up give some percentage back after a protest. https://www.jornada.com.mx/2022/08/06/estados/022n1est

Its one of the reasons why I am a market based socialist. The essentials of living should be state owned, and provided as inexpensively or freely as part of being here. And when that doesn't completely work, significant controls be put in place to prevent undue capitalization/financial ideation. The next tier should be a middle ground of intermediate importance, that companies can fulfill, but with modest controls to…

I might've got a bad translation, but :

> the parastatal Water and Drainage Services of Monterrey

Isn't that already the state owning the water supply?

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#233
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you. Unless they are outright blocking your entire connection. That is precisely why one would use a vpn. A vpn most definitely can help get around blocking key words.

you can't solve political issues with technological solutions. Sure you can use VPN, but they always can block more. As the last resort they will have a whitelist of government-approved IPs you can connect to

> you can't solve political issues with technological solutions. Sure you can use VPN, but they always can block more. As the last resort they will have a whitelist of government-approved IPs you can connect to

You are in a thread specifically talking about blocking swaths of the internet because of football games.

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#234
post #134

I thought the solution that everybody wanted was Starlink? Because that will never be politicized or weaponized ...

I don't want to be dependant on Starlink (or any one provider) for internet. I think the world is better when there's an access point that governments can't shut off.

I was being sarcastic in case it wasn't clear. I agree with you.

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in an alternate dimension where Snow Crash literally happened?! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

Burbclaves coming next: https://www.wired.com/story/startup-nations-donald-trump-leg...

This type of crazy shit makes me love Canada even more

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#236

Apps should respond to events like this by becoming smaller--so that you can only collaborate with people on your network partition. Most of the time they instead break altogether. The future is way to uncertain to assume a reliably connected future, which is what most of our tech is doing.

Briar does just that

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to make a point? The indeterminate forms are statements about limits. Those limits are statements about the possible range of certain operations on infinitesimal and infinite values. It's perfectly valid to multiply those values. And when zero is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product. You might want to think about why two times infinity is not an indeterminate form.

I am, thanks for noticing. If you extend your field to include infinity (e.g. the extended reals, or the extended positive reals), only then is it valid to multiply by infinity. One of the rules in such a system is that when infinity is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product. This gives us conflicting results for zero times infinity, therefore 0*∞ is an indeterminate form.

You do not appear to have the slightest idea what you're talking about. For example, the extended reals aren't a field.

But it's easy to extend the real numbers to a field that includes infinite and infinitesimal values. Limiting is then a projection from the hyperreals, which are a field, to the extended reals, which aren't. Instead of "lim", let's call this projection "f".

0·∞ is an indeterminate form because f(f⁻¹(0) · f⁻¹(∞)) is not well defined. f is a many-to-one function, and in this case the different possibilities that come up as we invert it interact differently. In contrast, 2·∞ is not an indeterminate form because, while f⁻¹(2) · f⁻¹(∞) might be any value that is greater than all real numbers, it must always be greater than all real numbers, and therefore f(f⁻¹(2) · f⁻¹(∞)) is always ∞.

> One of the rules in such a system is that when infinity is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product.

In the extended reals, this is a result, not a rule, and it doesn't always hold. Again, the extended reals aren't a field. But even ignoring the question we're actively discussing, you should have been able to think of e.g. -3 · ∞.

That's assuming that when you said "such a system", you meant the extended reals. If you meant a field that extends the reals to include infinite values, it's just meaningless noise - there is no value called "infinity" that would even let you evaluate the claim true or false. But in any multiplication of two values, any infinite value can only simultaneously be the product and one of the multiplicands if the other multiplicand is 1. When we say that 2·∞ = ∞, the ∞ on the left and the one on the right are both infinitely large, but they aren't the same value.

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#238

Internet has become an essential right up there with housing, electricity, water etc. Everywhere around the world people are connected to the internet. Even in poor African countries.

Um. Yeah. The internet is important. But if you go some places in this world you learn in a very swift fashion that it is not as important as housing, food, and water. There's parts of the world that are not a fairy tale. Places where people have far more basic worries. That said, if there are parts of Africa where people want the luxury of internet, they should, of course, be allowed access. The mere fact that they…

Increasingly, you need the internet working to access your money or pay for things. I've found you unfortunately need to pay for food.

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>In germany theiy raid your home for harmless political satire) Can you give some examples so we can see what harmless political satire you have in mind?

Andy Grote comes to mind. Someone tweeted "Du bist so 1 Pimmel" (something like "you are such a willy") at him. Got his house searched and everything for that. Issue here being the fact that insulting someone is a criminial offense (hope that's the correct english terminology) in Germany. https://theweek.com/news/world-news/954635/willygate-german-... e:/ Whether this is actual satire or not is up for debate i guess,…

> "Du bist so 1 Pimmel" (something like "you are such a willy")

Sure, it's something like that, but it's more like "thou beest such a willy". ;D

Re: Internet shutdowns at record high in Africa as access 'weaponised'

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Starlink makes "internet shutdown" impotent It still requires a radio transmitter. If push comes to shove, a government can still track RF leakage or worst case GPS jamming (if it's really that existential). Iran did the same thing when cracking down on Satelite TV and SatPhones during the crackdown of the Green Revolution (anti-Ahmedinijad protests in 2009) and anecdotally, Starlink terminals have been increasingl…

A lot of these people talk about Starlink like they never heard of RF engineering. It's like, "Um, guy, Starlink can be shut down too."

Starlink just transmits to a ground station thats 99% of the time in the same country. Its not some magical space internet, its just regular internet bottled and delivered by satellite.

RF is really where this discussion needs to be, you and your mate jim can set up a bunch of UBNT hardware and create your own intranet really god damn easily. No reliance on some guy who signed on to all your governments internet censorship laws.

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